Tag: education


  • Dylan, literature, Moby-Dick, and homeschooling

    Bob Dylan finally got around to delivering his Nobel Lecture. No surprise, it focused on literature. Why the wait? It took him some time, he said, to reflect on how his songs relate to literature. He ended by cautioning that songs are fundamentally different than literature, “meant to be sung, not read,” like the words in…

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  • Gimme shelter

    A headline caught my eye today. Even For Homeschoolers, There Is No Happily Ever After. The writer, Linda DeMers Hummel, had a job answering phones for a curriculum company whose clients were homeschoolers. Most of the questions were about math, but then she got a call from a mother who wouldn’t let her eighth grade…

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  • Bathrooms and trust

    Bathroom business. It’s pretty basic stuff, a part of every human being’s daily life. When my eldest daughter, after years of homeschooling, enrolled in public high school, she had to deal with the restrictions placed on all students about their bathroom use. By the time she was an upperclassman, I guess she was a little…

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  • ‘Unschoolers’ launch day

    Dear Readers, My co-author Sophia Sayigh and I have been working on Unschoolers for a while and I’m delighted to announce that it’s available now. Visit our website for various ways you can purchase the book in e-book and paperback formats. I hope you’ll consider spreading the word among your friends in conversation, on e-lists,…

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  • ‘Good Housekeeping’ on unschooling

    I grew up with Good Housekeeping. It was the one magazine my mother subscribed to, and since there wasn’t a lot of reading material around my house and I liked to read, I read it. Perhaps my familiarity with the magazine’s style contributed to my lack of surprise about the article it just published about unschooling.…

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  • ‘Unschoolers’ coming in March

    I’ve been a homeschooler with an unschooling philosophy for 26 years. I’ve read a lot of great books on the subject, but it’s rare to encounter homeschoolers and unschoolers in fiction. It’s even more rare to see our lives portrayed as anything other than extreme in one form or another. So, I, along with my…

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  • Unschooling: they still don’t get it

    Today I came across an article about homeschooling by Mirza Yawar Baig that lifted a quote of mine from last year’s Boston Magazine article. In talking about my kids I said: “I wanted them to be in charge of their own education and decide what they were interested in, and not have someone else telling them…

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  • On depriving kids of screens

    “Deprive” is such a loaded word. It came up this week in an online thread about technology, a long and winding discussion in response to a mom expressing concern about allowing her child unlimited screen time. Many unschoolers feel that limiting screen time does not mesh with unschooling philosophy, and said so. I shared my own story,…

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  • Unschooling: All you need is love

    This week I attended a screening of Clara Bellar’s film Being and Becoming. The movie portrays the filmmaker’s process of learning about unschooling in order to determine whether to choose it for her own family. It’s a personal journey that takes us to the United States, France, England, and Germany. One of the movie’s strengths is…

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  • Not back to school time, again

    The nights are getting cooler, our first butternut squashes from the garden have been picked, apples are showing up at my local farmers’ market. Fall is coming, the season of mists and yellow fruitfulness, to quote John Keats. It’s the season of the bittersweet, harvests of plenty, and the last gasps of beauty and fullness…

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